All your Font Needs
Accessing Font Glyphs with Font Book on Mac
In this tutorial, learn how to access Font Glyphs on a Mac using Font Book.
Many font designers these days are filling their fonts full of ligatures, alternate characters, and more. These extra characters help make your designs more unique and sometimes give it a more hand lettered feel.
Today we will be showing you how to access and use font glyphs on Mac, using Font Book.
For this tutorial we are using the Witch Hazel font, by the uber talented Missy Meyer. If you love fonts with ligatures, definitely check out Missy’s shop. The Pinsetter font is a must!
Before getting started, make sure you have already installed your font to your Mac.
Step 1 - Open Font Book
To open Font Book you can go to your Launchpad or open a Spotlight Search (Cmd + Spacebar).
Then type in “Font Book”.
Step 2 - Select Your Font
You’ll see all of your installed fonts under User. Scroll down until you see the font you would like to use.
Step 3 - Locate Your Glyphs in Font Book
If you’re not already, make sure you click on the “4 squares” symbol, which switches you to Repertoire mode. This will show you all the glyphs, or characters, included in the font.
Some fonts will have the glyphs all the way at the bottom, while others will have it mixed in with the font. It all depends how the font designer coded the font.
The glyphs will not appear any different than the regular characters, but if you are curious to know the difference you can hover over any letter.
You’ll see that this is the standard B for this font.
If you scroll down you’ll start to see more options for letters. We have highlighted the Alternate Character for D and you can see the code is U+E029.
To use the alternate character in your program, you can copy (Cmd + C) and paste (Cmd + V) the letter into your program.
It should be noted that in order for the glyphs to appear you will need the font to already be selected in that program. This is the method you would use for using glyphs in Cricut.
You have now learned how to use font glyphs in Font Book with your Mac! For using font glyphs in specific programs, check out our guides for Photoshop, Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Silhouette Studio, and Inkscape.
